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Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, argued on the program that the issue was one of religious freedom, not one of denying access to health care.

Republicans had been criticized 10 days earlier for holding a hearing on contraceptive coverage that lacked any women testifying. Yet there were no elected Republican women appearing on the political shows that Sunday to support the party's position. In politics, that's called "bad optics."

To be sure, the networks, not the parties, select guests for Sunday shows, and women of any political persuasion are underrepresented: They generally make up about one-fifth of guests. On Sunday, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., appeared as part of the NBC program's roundtable discussion.

Last week's disparity illustrates a challenge the GOP faces in the "war on women" controversy and, come fall, in combating President Obama's strength among female voters: The party is in something of a rebuilding season for its roster of prominent spokeswomen.

Two of the five Republican women in the Senate are retiring, and the House members and female governors the party would like to put forward are still freshmen yet to establish much name recognition. The two best-known Republican women, Sarah Palin and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, have been preoccupied with presidential candidacies — actual or contemplated — and so are less available to promote a party message. (Palin appears regularly on Fox News Channel but is not widely available to the media; to get a comment from her last week, CNN staked out the Super Tuesday Republican caucus in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska.)

"It's slim pickings when the Republicans find themselves in a situation like this," says Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University in Washington, D.C. "That's been a public relations debacle on the part of the GOP."

Nor could the Republicans call on two of their five female senators when the Senate voted March 1 on a measure that would have allowed employers to opt out of providing coverage for anything to which they had a moral objection — the measure Democrats characterized as anti-women. Maine's Olympia Snowe voted against it, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said afterward that she wished she had.

Republican Party officials say they have a strong team of elected women who personify the party's support of women. Four of the six female governors are Republican, and one of the eight House Republican leadership positions is held by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington. "We have a bench full of smart, conservative women who love America, love our party and love their jobs," said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. "They're going to be out there fighting every day to set the record straight."

Republicans are at a numerical disadvantage: 90 of 535 members of the House and Senate are female. Of those women, two-thirds are Democrats. The GOP has 29 women in the House and Senate, before several high-profile departures. Snowe announced her retirement last month, and Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, formerly a member of Senate leadership, is also stepping down.

Although Republican women are considered contenders in Senate races in Hawaii and New Mexico, in the House, Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt of Ohio won't be coming back: She lost her party primary Tuesday.

"What we've been watching over time is a kind of flatlining for (elected) women overall, but a large part of it is … no growth to loss on the Republican side," says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "There is a real challenge for the Republican Party if they want to be seen as a party that is inclusive and has women's representation in it."

Some of the women Republicans hope will become stars are still building national name recognition, including Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Rep. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who was named to a new leadership post for freshmen.

"It's not that they are dissing women candidates or not actively pursuing them, but right now, they're sort of in a dry spell,'' Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report says.

Republicans are "highly sensitized," to the importance of having visible female leaders, says Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, which supports conservative female candidates.

"It's essential that there are strong accomplished Republican women voices out front. I think they're out there," Nance says.

On the day the Senate voted on the religious exemption amendment, Nance's organization held a news conference supporting the Republican position, featuring Blackburn, Schmidt and other Republican congresswomen. "It was exactly on point; it was exactly on message," Nance says. "And yet it wasn't covered the way it should have been.''

On the five Sunday chat shows, women made up less than 22% of guests during 2011, according to the American University Women and Politics Institute. According to a tally kept by the newspaper Roll Call, the elected official with the most appearances on Sunday chat shows last year, regardless of gender, was Bachmann, who appeared 20 times last year. Wasserman Schultz appeared eight times.

Of the eight women who appeared on the five chat shows March 4, four were journalists, one was a Democratic strategist, two were right-leaning columnists. But there were no elected Republican women on Sunday shows that morning. In the absence of female elected officials, "what they end up doing is looking at the punditry class and the columnists," Duffy says.

Republicans views are more often represented by cable pundits such as Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, former Bush campaign strategist Mary Matalin and Reagan speechwriter-turned-columnist Peggy Noonan.

That is not as helpful, Lawless says." If your best spokespeople for the party are pundits, you have a problem, because they're not accountable to anybody. We saw that with Rush Limbaugh."

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